It was with the rank of general that Joe Zasloff arrived in Saigon with his wife Tela
in summer 1964 to run a new RAND research project called “Viet Cong Motivation
and Morale.” Harry Rowen in the Pentagon had agreed to fund the project. As did
other civilians attached to the Defense Department in Vietnam, Zasloff had to carry
a military rank roughly the equivalent of what he would have qualified in civil service
status. Before Zasloff’s departure, an aide to Harry Rowen telephoned RAND and
asked what rank Zasloff should have. Since Zasloff was going to depend on the U.S.
Military Assistance Command in Vietnam for support for everything from obtaining
living quarters to securing transport for his field study, the reply was, “Do the very best
you can, it’s a difficult project, and the higher we can get, the better.”1 The Pentagon
obliged and gave Zasloff the rank of general to facilitate his work in Vietnam.

Traveling to a war zone required more than getting a ticket and boarding a plane.
First, the Zasloffs had to obtain theater clearance from the Department of Defense.
This did not pose a problem since the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project had
been approved by the International Security Affairs within the Office of the Secretary
of Defense. For Joe Zasloff, who knew French, the language most of South Vietnam’s
elite still spoke, going to Vietnam was not as novel as it had been in 1959, when he was
selected to teach at the University of Saigon. He had applied for a grant simply to teach
abroad, destination unspecified, and when he was informed that he had been assigned
to a place called Saigon, he ran to a map to see where it was located.2

Zasloff had learned French in high school and college. His fluency had improved
while he served in France during World War II and subsequently while studying at the
University of Geneva for his doctorate degree. In Saigon, he taught as a visiting professor at the Faculty of Law, lecturing in French, and collaborated with the University of
Michigan Group on a study of provincial administration in Vinh Long in the Mekong
Delta. Zasloff thus belonged to a small group of Vietnam experts who possessed first-

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